Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Down syndrome

  • Down’s syndrome

    JMS Pearce Hull, England Fig 1. A patient at Earlswood photographed by Langdon Down. Via Alchetron. Amongst the residents he attended at Earlswood Asylum for Idiots in Redhill, Surrey, John Langdon Down in 1865 began to use an anthropological classification. He identified a group of patients who were mentally delayed and showed a remarkably similar,…

  • Beauty in breaking

    Lealani Acosta Nashville, Tennessee, United States   Photo courtesy of Lealani Mae Acosta. Permission granted by Teresa Briley-Scott.  I had a succulent hanging from my office cabinet, suspended in a clear teardrop-shaped terrarium: its spiny green arches floated above a mound of fake snow, which I intermittently illuminated by touching the built-in switch that electrified…

  • Nazi doctors and medical eponyms

    Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden   “Special Children’s Ward” Vienna Am Spiegelgrund. Source. The tradition in medicine has been to name a pathological condition after the person who first described it in the medical literature. Thus we have Addison’s disease, Down’s syndrome, and several hundred others. The tendency now is to eliminate the possessive,1 giving Addison…

  • Rethinking the impulse to empathize: a sister’s perspective on sympathy and stigma

    Jeanne Farnan Pennsylvania, United States   Mary Cassatt, Mother Combing Sara’s Hair, 1901. Private collection. Web Gallery of Impressionism “I am so sorry.” My youngest sister, Annie, was born during the spring semester of my first year of high school. These four words are etched into my memory, integrally intertwined with the events of that…

  • The boy with two dads

    David Thoele Chicago, Illinois, United States   Martin pictured with his two dads The first time I met Martin in my clinic, the 7-year-old seemed friendly, but shy.  He was a bit chubby, with dark, short-cropped hair, rounded fingernails, and blue-tinged skin. He was short for his age, with features of Down syndrome, which his…

  • Down syndrome through the centuries in art

    Bojana CokićZajecar, Serbia  Though fully described by John Langdon Down in 1862, this syndrome of delayed growth, characteristic facial features, and intellectual impairment has been featured in numerous works of art since antiquity. References BOJANA COKIĆ, MD, is a pediatrician specialized in clinical genetics at the Children’s Hospital in Zajecar, Serbia, where she was been…

  • Reflections on medicine and art

    Bojana CokićZajecar, Serbia Oscar Wilde believed that life imitates art and that what we perceive is beautiful only because “art” has taught us to regard it as such. But if indeed “life is art,” as Maxim Gorki wrote, “to be found in all its beauty and joy,” then clearly life has been with us since…